How close has your child been to a dead raccoon?
The parents of New York City need to know
While researching my previous Lede project, I discovered that in recent years, the most common animal-related call to 311 in New York City was to report a dead animal. Dead animal calls go to the Department of Sanitation, unless they are inside a park. And it turns out the department gets a lot of calls about raccoons. Raccoons were the second most commonly reported dead animal, after cats. But unlike cats, every reported raccoon had to be a wild animal.
There were nearly 3,700 reported dead raccoons between September 2021 and June 2024. That's a lot of dead raccoons.
Just how many raccoons live in this city anyway?
There's no official count, though one expert estimated 100 raccoons per square mile in the city back in 2016.
Day to day, most New Yorkers aren't that likely to interact with raccoons, who generally don't confront humans and prefer to scavenge garbage at night. When an adult sees a dead raccoon, they're likely to avoid it, and at most call 311 to get it removed by the city.
But children are different. They are curious, and sometimes like to poke dead animals with sticks. How likely is it that a New York City child has played with a dead raccoon? We can't know precisely, but we can examine how close reported dead raccoons were to the city's elementary schools. So that's what I did.